What I Learned From Atheists

Two statements: The Christian faith makes a significant, noticeable, and practical difference in a person's life. A person who is not a Christian is eternally separated from God. Either of these statements—both made by atheists—is a powerful argument for evangelism if we really were to believe them. If both are true, we need to throw off the influence of secularization, restore the Christian mind in our thinking, and unashamedly proclaim the truth of the Gospel.
—from Larry Stone at realclearreligion.org
(So many excellent thoughts in this article. Please read it all at the link above).

Christopher Hitchens embraces faith?

Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens, my favorite athiest, is dying of esophageal cancer. Numerous pleas for him to embrace faith have been met with just as many pledges never to do so. But from novelist Martin Amis, whom Hitchens calls his "dearest friend," comes perhaps the most interesting entreaty of all:  

My dear Hitch: there has been much wild talk, among the believers, about your impending embrace of the sacred and the supernatural. This is of course insane. But I still hope to convert you, by sheer force of zealotry, to my own persuasion: agnosticism. In your seminal book, God Is Not Great, you put very little distance between the agnostic and the atheist; and what divides you and me (to quote Nabokov yet again) is a rut that any frog could straddle. "The measure of an education," you write elsewhere, "is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance." And that's all that "agnosticism" really means: it is an acknowledgment of ignorance. Such a fractional shift (and I know you won't make it) would seem to me consonant with your character – with your acceptance of inconsistencies and contradictions, with your intellectual romanticism, and with your love of life, which I have come to regard as superior to my own.

 The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation – to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the multiverse. The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself to be an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a "higher intelligence" – because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it.

After reading that, I felt compelled to say that Amis is right: The only logical and reasonable stance concerning God (that is, solely based on logic and reason) is that of agnostic. I readily admit my faith and belief in God is exactly that: faith and belief. Yet Hitchens probably does not admit that his denial of the existence of God is equally a stand of faith and belief, and not logic and reason.

So, I guess you could say Christopher Hitchens has embraced faith. Of a sort.

—Wayne S. (Martin Amis quote From "Amis on Hitchens" in The Guardian.)
UPDATE: The above quotation also appears in Amis's foreword to The Quotable Hitchens.

Well, if you put it THAT way

   My favorite atheist, Christopher Hitchens, is extremely confident in his atheism. Would that I were so confident in my theism! He does pose some interesting questions, such as this:

Would we have adopted monotheism in the first place if we had known:

That our species is at most 200,000 years old, and very nearly joined the 98.9 percent of all other species on our planet by becoming extinct, in Africa, 60,000 years ago, when our numbers seemingly fell below 2,000 before we embarked on our true "exodus" from the savannah?

That the universe, originally discovered by Edwin Hubble to be expanding away from itself in a flash of red light, is now known to be expanding away from itself even more rapidly, so that soon even the evidence of the original "big bang" will be unobservable?

That the Andromeda galaxy is on a direct collision course with our own, the ominous but beautiful premonition of which can already be seen with a naked eye in the night sky?

These are very recent examples, post-Darwinian and post-Einsteinian, and they make pathetic nonsense of any idea that our presence on this planet, let alone in this of so many billion galaxies, is part of a plan. Which design, or designer, made so sure that absolutely nothing (see above) will come out of our fragile current "something"? What plan, or planner, determined that millions of humans would die without even a grave marker, for our first 200,000 years of struggling and desperate existence, and that there would only then at last be a "revelation" to save us, about 3,000 years ago, but disclosed only to gaping peasants in remote and violent and illiterate areas of the Middle East?

   Well done, sir! The only answer I can think of, and I know it will not satisfy, is this: That the invitation to a spiritual life with and in the God of this chaotic universe is available as a limited-time offer. It is not intrinsically unfair that at some point something new is offered to those who may have been hitherto unable to acquire it. The issue is not what of the millions who came before, but what of Christopher and Wayne. One perceives a blessing, the other does not.
   For now, we have both made our choices.
—Wayne S.
   Quotation is from the Big Questions Essay Series at www.templeton.org.

Christopher Hitchens on Sincere Faith

Christopher Hitchens is a renowned author, journalist and atheist apologist. He is currently featured in the documentary Collision, a record of a series of cross-country debates with Pastor Douglas Wilson, senior fellow at New St. Andrews College. Just as all evangelicals are not nosy hypocrites, not all atheists are grouchy critics. In an article in Slate, it will be surprising to some what Hitchens finds praiseworthy of his debate partner:   

"Wilson isn't one of those evasive Christians who mumble apologetically about how some of the Bible stories are really just 'metaphors.' He is willing to maintain very staunchly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and that his sacrifice redeems our state of sin, which in turn is the outcome of our rebellion against God. He doesn't waffle when asked why God allows so much evil and suffering—of course he 'allows' it since it is the inescapable state of rebellious sinners. I much prefer this sincerity to the vague and Python-esque witterings of the interfaith and ecumenical groups who barely respect their own traditions and who look upon faith as just another word for community organizing."